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Alex Mincek: Torrent

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Torrent is the first recording of Mincek’s music since his 2011 self-titled debut on Carrier Records and launches Sound American’s Young Composer Portrait (YCP) series, which introduces emerging artists by releasing music from the span of their career alongside a series of interviews and essays that contextualize the ways in which their history, aesthetic, and sound thinking have informed their work to date.

Although he has gained acclaim for his early work with the post-rock group Zs, Alex Mincek is receiving long overdue attention for his chamber music – an iconoclastic combination of timbral rigor with frightening rhythmic drive and mastery of melody. Mincek does all this without becoming banal or derivative. As the composer told SA editor Nate Wooley in their interview for this release, he wants to enter in a “conversation” with the composers that he studies, a virtual give and take of ideas as opposed to rote learning.

This approach is clear from the music on Torrent – from the knotty push and pull of the Stravinskyesque Pneuma to the epic slow growth of the title track, which harkens to the quiet turbulence of Klaus Lang. Alex Mincek is hyper-aware of his surroundings while actively developing (and refining) his own voice.

Torrent is being released as a deluxe art object meant to give the listener a multivalent overview of Mincek’s history, aesthetic, and impact on the contemporary music world. The disc comes in a beautiful hardcover book-like case along with 28 pages of notes including the composer’s conversation with Sound American Editor and experimental trumpeter Nate Wooley and in-depth interviews with musicians working closely with Mincek, including Ian Antonio, Eric Wubbels, and Josh Modney.